Author: Armchair Bellyacher

Head-Cannon Actress / Final Fantasy XIV

I’ve been playing the game Final Fantasy XIV recently. Even though it’s a massively multiplayer online game, there’s a very strong story, one you literally have to play through in order to unlock the multi-player content like dungeons and raids.

It’s possibly the first heavy story focused MMO. The original version came out a year before Star Wars: The Old Republic, but it’s no SW:TOR from a story engagement perspective.

The story is good. It’s pretty standard JRPG (Japanese Role Playing Game) fare. You’re the “chosen one” sent to defeat all the world’s ills all by yourself (despite the multi-player angle of the game). But therein lies the problem. JRPG characters tend to be silent protagonists. They very rarely speak, and the player rarely has any agency in the story. Things just kind of happen, and the player is expected to guide the character in a linear fashion toward the next goal told to them. Exposition is handled by the characters around the protagonist explaining everything to each other while your character witnesses it. There’s nothing wrong with this approach to storytelling. It can provide some very compelling narratives, but it does lead to some awkwardness from an audience perspective. The protagonist feels more like an audience member than an active participant. The most amazing things are happening and, at best, the hero might have a mild look of shock, but most of the time it’s just the same neutral expression.

The longer I played the more I wanted a reason why my character acted this way, and slowly a narrative developed in my head…

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The Problem with Ahsoka (the show…)

The first episode of Ahsoka ends with a shocking cliffhanger… that lacks any tension or stakes if you have even the slightest amount of grey matter between your ears. Despite this, I feel no compulsion to keep watching. I just needed that first episode to confirm my suspicions, which it did resoundingly.

So what’s wrong with it? Is it bad?

Eh, it’s no worse than anything Disney has produced since 2015. It’s also not much better than the least interesting things they’ve produced.

The problem is accessibility. Allow me to extrapolate…

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2023 in Movies… so far.

I haven’t done one of these in a long time, mostly because I don’t care anymore. I used to really enjoy going to the movies, but with the death of the mid-budget films (virtually all going straight to streaming), I’m pretty much only going to see tent-pole films, most of which are mediocre at best.

Anyway, here’s what I’ve seen in 2023 so far. This is a mix of movies I saw at the cinema this year, regardless of release date, and movies released this year I watched at home.

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Picard S03E01 Watch Notes

Here we go. Star Trek: Picard, Season 3. At this point Star Trek has become a really great relative you had growing up who was sweet, compassionate, funny, and loving, but at some point became bitter, resentful, and misanthropic. You carried forward the lessons they taught you as a kid, but now they seem to hate everything about you, and everything about who they were then. Alas, the end has come. And now they’re on their deathbed in hospice and you feel compelled to re-visit them one last time.

Goes without saying: Spoilers Ahead… for a series that was already pretty spoiled… like uncooked scrambled eggs, mixed with raw ground beef, left for days in the summer sun.

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Justifying Andor

So far Andor is the best Star Wars anything since The Empire Strikes Back… and I do not say that lightly. It still has time to shit the bed, it is Star Wars after all, a series with a history of falling to pieces as it continues.

I’m trying my hardest to justify how Andor can exist in the same universe as the Original and Prequel Trilogies. They are telling stories built upon one another but have such shockingly different approaches and tones. And here’s what I have come up with…

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House of the Dragon S01E01 Thoughts

I’ll cut right to the chase. This first episode is pretty good. It’s far more focused than its predecessor (or should I say successor… narratively?). We have only a handful of characters we follow at the start, and we get pretty clear direction on their motivation.

It helps that the audience is, likely, already familiar with the universe, so there isn’t a massive dumpster fire of exposition to get things rolling. “Remember the other show? Yeah? Ok, this is that world, but like 170 years earlier, cool? Let’s begin…”

So far, the performances are fine. Nobody seems woefully miscast or confused about their role. The white wigs always look awful, but that’s less to do with the quality of the wigs and more to do with how unnatural that seems to the human eye.

These all sound like bland praise, but it’s hard to get super excited for a show that follows up on an epic narrative that was hilariously botched.

But on to the negatives… WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!

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Faux Controversy

Here’s a phenomenon that’s been going on for a decade (or more?) that shows no signs of slowing down.

A reboot/sequel to a popular franchise happens. The newest iteration has a diverse cast (as it should). A few social media accounts (typically a new account with few followers) blast the newest iteration for being “woke” and harkening back to the “good old days” when everything was white, male, and heterosexual.

Now, this will happen regardless of how diverse the original/earlier iterations of the media were. This often leads to people who actually understand, and have engaged with, the original iteration scratching their heads wondering what on Earth this person can be on about. It makes no sense. It’s not even worth reacting to. This is obviously a troll. It is obviously someone who is just trying to start some shit.

Predictably someone with 100 followers spots this and is compelled to share it and virtue signal that they disagree and believe diversity is great. One of their followers, with 1000 followers, does the same, and then 10,000, and then 100,000, and eventually the people involved in the new media respond by sharing the original sentiment and attacking it with vigor, and denouncing the masses of racist/misogynist/homophobic fans of the franchise. “Hate has no place in our fanbase!” Millions of eyes are on it now.

Eventually the story gets carried into the mainstream news and is woven into a narrative of how racist/misogynist/homophobic the “old fans” of the franchise are.

Remember, this starts with only a few people making troll statements.

It’s a predictable cycle. It happens to every-single-franchise now. Even franchises that have been traditionally diverse, like Star Trek. The producers often work this controversy into their own marketing to try and generate buzz for their property among people who traditionally didn’t watch it.

Makes you wonder who actually started the controversy in the first place if in the end it only benefits the people making the show/movie.